Dispatches From The Picket Lines, Day 45: Unionized Strippers In The Pole Position At Warner Bros & Broadway Day In Times Square

A fire has broken out after an explosion was heard on the Warner Bros studio lot in Burbank on Friday.

The Writers Guild of America strike continued Thursday with a demonstration at Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles that featured appearances by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, as well as a slew of Dolly Parton drag queens on the picket lines.

It was musical Monday for WGA picketers on day 56 of the Writers Guild strike, with Death Row Records representing in front of Sunset Bronson Studios, site of one of Netflix’s many Los Angeles-based offices.

A new report has revealed what happened during the screen tests for the upcoming DC Studios movie Superman: Legacy.

Editor’s note: Bryn Mathieu lives near one of the studios, where WGA picketing and honking occurs daily. In May, law enforcement in Burbank posted an electronic sign outside of Warner Bros warning drivers that excessive horn use violates 27001 of the California Vehicle Code. The law enforces “reasonably necessary” horn blowing to insure safe operation of other vehicles. Otherwise, “the horn shall not otherwise be used, except as a theft alarm system.”

Spike Lee was not on the speakers list at a rally Thursday morning for striking film and television writers outside City Hall in New York. But one of the Brooklyn-born filmmaker’s best-loved movies, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, kept cropping up as local elected officials took turns calling for studio executives to resume negotiations with the Writers Guild of America and help end a strike now in its eighth week.

A Place in the Sun star Jonnie Irwin has shared emotional snaps for his 'best Father's Day ever' as he spend the day surrounded by his loved ones.

It was a busy day on the L.A.-area WGA picket lines, with a visit from some Abbott Elementary folks, support from unionized teachers and nurses, and dancers getting their hula on for Pacific Islander Day.

US soap The Young And The Restless, where he played police detective Carl Williams. His close friend, photographer Mary Ann Halpin, confirmed the news this week ‘with a heavy heart. ’Taking to Facebook, she announced she had said ‘goodbye to my sweet friend Brett Hadley.

Sophia Scorziello editor Brett Hadley, soap actor who starred as Carl Williams for two decades on “The Young and the Restless,” has died. He was 92. Hadley died on Thursday at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, according to his friend Darcy Lee. “We talked about movies and art.. and we laughed a lot! He even made me laugh on his death bed,” wrote Lee in a post. “He waited to pass tonight until my show was over and I walked out of the theatre. He took his last bow as I got into the car to come home. I will miss you terribly Brett Hadley – and thank you for being in my life.”

Big news in specialty this weekend as Asteroid City arrives in theaters with Wes Anderson and his army of fans behind it and a major marketing campaign by Focus Features. The director’s latest opens at six locations in New York and Los Angeles, where Focus has partnered with Landmark for the reopening of Sunset, the five-screen theater it took over from AMC early this year.

Melissa McCarthy, who played lovable chef Sookie St. James on all seven seasons, recently opened up about one big downside to filming the mother-daughter dramedy starring Lauren Graham as Lorelai Gilmore and Alexis Bledel as her daughter, Rory Gilmore.Though the show takes place in the fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow, it was actually filmed at the Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. Pictures Animation has hired Shane Prigmore to serve as Senior Creative Advisor for the newly relaunched film unit under President Bill Damaschke. 

She doesn’t smell snow! Melissa McCarthy starred on Gilmore Girls for seven seasons — but filming the beloved show wasn’t always an easy feat.  

The head of the country’s largest labor union joined striking Writers Guild film and television writers at a rally on Monday outside the New York City offices of streaming giant Amazon and said the writers’ cause has the support of workers from across unionized labor. 

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Sphere in Las Vegas isn’t just a round vehicle for a series of fall U2 concerts — it’s also host to an immersive screen of mammoth proportions that will be its own attractions when there aren’t any world-class rock bands taking over the space. And even when they are, someone has still got to come up with the visual content that will be part-and-parcel with any live residency there. That’s where Sphere Studios will come in, a division of Sphere Entertainment Co. that was announced Monday as the provider for what will appear on the venue’s ultimate big screen in Vegas (and those like it that are planned for Spheres to be built in other cities). Also revealed Monday as part of the rollout for Sphere Studios was Big Sky, described as “an ultra-high resolution camera system” that is “the first of the Studios’ many groundbreaking immersive innovations.”

Jon Burlingame On the scoring stage at 20th Century-Fox studios in Burbank, composer Jongnic Bontemps is walking around in a “Transformers: The Movie” T-shirt – that’s the animated cartoon from 1986, not the $200-million summer blockbuster he’s just scored. “Violins, play a little softer,” he tells the musicians via intercom from the glass booth behind the stage. “It has to be emotional.” Later, after a rehearsal on a different cue, he tells the string players, “It needs to feel like a warm blanket.” Bontemps is making movie history. He has just spent two years writing the music for “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” the seventh in the big-screen franchise, and he’s supervising the recording of the final pieces of the score with a 74-piece orchestra. The film opens Friday.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events.

The day after New York-based pickets were canceled for the week because of smoke, the gathering at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles was a bit smaller on Thursday, with less than 50 people gathering in support of the WGA strike.

EXCLUSIVE: Following months of going through dozens of audition tapes, Warner Bros and DC Films look to be getting closer to finding the stars of their Superman: Legacy movie as a second round of testing looks to be imminent.